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Edmund de Waal Biography

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“There is something about that burning of all those letters that gives me pause: why should everything be made clear and be brought into the light? Why keep things, archive your intimacies? Why not let thirty years of shared conversation go spiralling in ash up into the air of Tunbridge Wells? Just because you have it does not mean you have to pass it on. Losing things can something gain you a space in which to live.”

LettersPrivacyLosing ThingsBurning LettersPreserving MemoriesSharing Intimacies
Book:The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss
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“It makes me wonder what belonging to a place means. Charles died a Russian in Paris. Viktor called it wrong and was a Russian in Vienna for fifty years, then Austrian, then a citizen of the Reich, and then stateless. Elisabeth kept Dutch citizenship in England for fifty years. And Iggie was Austrian, then American, then an Austrian living in Japan. You assimilate, but you need somewhere else to go. You keep your passport to hand. You keep something private.”

CitizenshipAssimilationCountriesPassportBelonging To A Place
Book:The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss
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“Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps a patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed, the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible, the way that this netsuke of a fox has become little more than a memory of a nose and a tail. But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing, and the way the leaves of my medlar shine.”

WayFeelsYearsKindLittlesTwoStoriesSeemsProcessMemoriesClearPiecesShareObjectsEssentialsGainsYears AgoRiversStonesShiningNosesTwo YearsTailsFoxesFurnitureOaksTwo Years AgoAdditives
Author:Edmund de Waal
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